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POPULAR CUSTOMS AND BELIEFS 



OF THE 



ARGEBTIflE PROVISOES 



BY 



PAUL GROUSSAC, 



Librarian of the ''Biblioteca Nacional" at Buenos Ayres: 
Commissioner of the Argentine Republic. 



ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE WORLD'S .FOLK- .LORE CONGRESS 

CONVENED IN CHICAGO DURING THE WORLD'S 

COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION. 



JULY 14, 1893. 



CHICAGO : 

DONOHUE, HENNEBERRY & CO. 
1893. 



**r f 



V™ 






POPULAR CUSTOMS AND BELIEFS 



OF THE 



ARGENTINE PROVINCES. 



Ladies and Gentlemen: 

I have heard so much of your indulgence toward 
foreigners who try to speak your language, so con- 
cise and strong, that I had the curiosity to take 
my chances. Coming from me, the attempt is 
very bold ; but among the numerous things that I 
hope to learn with you, timidity, I believe, is not in 
the programme. After all the venture is not very 
dangerous for anybody, not even for me, who do 
not put any amour-propre into it, and a hard time 
is soon over. 

Yet a recent experiment should give me some 
uneasiness. I was visiting, some time ago, a min- 
ing district in the far West, with one of your 



4 
fellow-countrymen, who proposed to accompany 
me. This charming colonel, for he was a colonel! 
as cultured as he was amiable, explained every- 
thing to me with an inexhaustible compliance. 
During a stay in Europe he had even learned 
frencli ; but it was some time ago, before the 
Crimean war, I believe. As he spoke English 
very rapidly, I did not catch very well some refrac- 
tory sentences ; but when he had translated them 
into my language, oh ! then, it was very different : 
I could not understand at all ! It was, with- 
out doubt, the fault of my untrained ear; and I am 
almost sure you understand me at least as well as 
if I spoke French. I will try to be clear, if not 
correct ; your kindness will do the rest. 

In spite of lack of auxiliary memoranda, I 
accepted at once the invitation tendered me, some 
days ago, to speak on a familiar subject which was 
suggested to me, and which really seems to meet 
a want of your interesting programme. It con- 
cerns the rustic and adventurous life, the customs 
and beliefs of our Argentine Gaueho % 

For the learned public who listen to me, this 
name is not new, no more so than the ethnic vari- 
ety which it designates. Outside of the travelers' 
narrations, I believe Walter Scott to be the first 
who threw it into wide literary circulation; but he 
used to write Guacho y which now means an entirely 
different thing. The great Carlyle, in his admira- 
ble Essay on Francia, the dictator of Paraguay, 
where he indulges somewhat in humor at the 



expense of our South American "heroes," has 
guessed at the true physiognomy of the Gaucho, 
careless and stoical, although often lacking "soap," 
as he says; and has painted him, as he knew how to 
paint, with the sharp intuition of the seer, and 
that fierce brush and exuberant color which our 
Michelet never surpassed. 

The subject is vast and diffuse, especially for us 
who live in the midst of it, and know almost too 
well its multiplied aspects and varieties. It con- 
cerns a group which is nearly a whole people ; and 
just for the reason that it is wide and indefinite, so 
to speak, like the immense theatre which this 
nomad traverses without ever occupying: I must 
only touch lightly upon it, without even trying to go 
into its depths, leaving to your own knowledge 
of analogical evolutions the care of filling blanks 
between significant features. Moreover, besides 
the" necessary limits of this lecture, the character of 
this distinguished audience, of languages and origin 
so varied, would forbid long developments as well 
as details of too local a nature, expressed in a dia- 
lect which, even for Spaniards or inhabitants of the 
other Hispano- American countries, requires fre- 
quent commentaries. 

As an old "pedagogue," I have a weakness for 
teaching through the eye. I should have liked to 
show you the scenery before the actors. You will 
have a very rough idea of it, if you compare the 
River Plate territory with the United States of a half 
century ago, when limited at the west, from north 



to south, by the chain of high Rocky Mountains. 
At the mouth of a river very much larger than your 
Mississippi, and which is the Riode la Plata, Buenos 
Ayres softly spreads out with a population twice 
that of New Orleans, in incommensurable green 
plains, which could easily hold Texas, Kansas and 
Missouri, together with Louisiana. That is the 
Savannah or the Pampa, which, descending from the 
cross chains of the Andes, stretches out southerly 
to the desert of Patagonia. This was, and still is, 
the territory of the Pampa gaucho, that gaucho 
who has so often been described, and who is known 
the best. At the northeast, on the river Parana, 
and in a geographical situation, reminding one of 
that of Illinois, another ethnical group, almost 
entirely indigenous, occupies Corrientes ; and is but 
a branch of the Guaranis who peopled the border- 
ing Paraguay. At the northwest, finally, in a coun- 
try which would about correspond to Nebraska and 
Dakota, another group dwells in the ancient Tucu- 
man of Spanish annals, the name of which is still 
kept by a very rich little province, but whose lan- 
guage and primitive traditions, scarcely touched by 
European civilization, have been preserved only 
in the forests of Santiago. However, I ask you not 
to attach any too precise value to these vague geo- 
graphical analogies, which I venture for the sole 
purpose of giving provisional information. 

About these three ethnical varieties, which are 
mingling more and more by modern life and nation- 
ality, one can say that the nearly pure native type of 



7 
Corrientes and of the Missions, which still speaks 
guarani, and which has hardly changed since the 
colonial era, has been sufficiently explained in the 
Jesuitic accounts of the last century. His gaucho 
character, he acquired by friction and infiltration. 
The two really different types, properly speaking, 
are the gaucho of Buenos Ayres or of the adjacent 
provinces, and the one of the forests of Tucuman, 
the true type of which is at Santiago. The latter, 
above all, besides having been much less described 
than the former, offers a very remarkable ethnolog- 
ical problem, a case of linguistic engrafting, for an 
analogy of which one would in vain look in Spanish 
America, and which, philologically, recalls the 
phenomenon of latin Roumania, for centuries en- 
closed like a foreign body, a parasitic concretion in 
the bosom of the Slavic world. As to the inhabit- 
ants of the neighboring valleys of Chile, one ought, 
I think, in an ethnical description, to connect 
together the two adjoining mountain sides, as 
much on account of supposed relationship between 
them, as of an incessant contact which has assimi- 
lated them. 

The primitive shape of a dwelling house of the 
pampa, or of the campo of Buenos Ayres, is well 
known ; moreover, you have a faithful reproduction 
of it in your ranches of the West. The word" ranch M 
itself is quite Spanish, but in the Californian mean- 
ing in which you use it, it must rather come from 
Mexico. In Peru, a rancho is a villa ; in our coun- 
try it is the gaucho's cottage. Your ranch (cattle 



8 

farm) of the far West is our estancia, or, rather, 
the puesto, which is, so to say, a branch of it. 
Before railroads made distances shorter, multiply- 
ing at the same time the centers of population and 
the parcelling out of the territory, the immense sea 
of pasture grounds, covered with cattle, in appear- 
ance undivided and boundless, stretched out in a 
radius of twenty or thirty leagues around the Capi- 
tal, Beyond, it was the desert and the Indian 
, tents or tolderias. At the centre of these rural 
estates of several square leagues, vaguely limited 
and never closed, a cattle farm, with its covered 
gallery, its roof, with a double declivity or with a 
terrace, stretched out its whitewashed walls. An 
^normus ornbu or a cluster of peach trees lent some 
cheerfulness to the rural homestead. At some 
distance from the master's house, some ranchos of 
shepherds or of cow-keepers, with their straw roofs 
overlooked the sheep's enclosures. 

The big cattle, beeves and horses, grazed at lib- 
erty. Herds belonging to different neighbors 
mingled without any prejudice to anybody. Oh 
days of meeting or of rodeo, the young cattle were 
marked at the sides of their mothers with a hot 
iron. It was the great festival of the year; they 
placed in an enclosure those which were to be sold, 
■each one recognizing and separating his property 
in a patriarchal way, as in the Biblical age. All 
those who were moving about, peones or servants, 
friends or passers-by, who had hastened to the feast 
of the l&zo and of the meat roasted on charcoal, 



9 
each one on his horse well saddled with the flaring- 
colored recado, the striped poncho high on the 
shoulder, the tongue as sharp as the knife in his 
belt: every one was a gaucho of the plain, which 
means simply any countryman fitted for the riding 
and breeding labors. 

I have been speaking in the past tense because 
I thought of the former province of Buenos Ayres 
which, until the last fifteen or twenty years, was 
confined in a half circle of about forty leagues in 
radius around the large city, extending to the 
Indian borders. The tribes are to-day driven back 
and scattered in the desert, where they gradually 
die out ; and the gauchos have taken their place, 
giving way in their turn to the European immi- 
gration, or transmuting themselves by contact and 
blood mixture. Rural property, increasing tenfold 
in value, was finally divided into parcels. Scientific 
breeding of the superior kinds of cattle, and the 
careful cultivation of the soil, surveyed and fenced 
in, created true pastoral and agricultural industry. 
Stables take the place of the old corral. From the 
next railroad station, the enriched landlord drives 
to his estancia. The old farm house has become 
a fine country dwelling, sometimes a castle with 
gardens and park. There are large farms at one 
hundred leagues from Buenos Ayres, formerly in 
the power of the Indians, where now English 
teams cross the plains, and where you go to dinner 
\ in a dress coat. The European breeders have thus 
thrust away the gaucho towards the old style farms, 



IO 

in the desert. It is there he is yet to be found, but 
weakened and impoverished by the contact with 
civilization, whenever he did not blend with the 
urban people. 

Moreover, this last evolution is made without 
effort ; many sons of the gauchos have been edu- 
cated in the college and live in the city. The 
gradual change was so much easier because our in- 
stitutions and democratic ways, entirely similar to 
yours, were applied to a popular element which 
does not differ essentially from the superior class, 
Add to this the invincible influence of the European 
element, which made the Argentine Republic the 
largest country for immigration, after the United 
States. In the other Hispano- American regions, 
all immigration has been absorbed by the numerous 
native population who occupy the ground, and 
sometimes, as in Mexico and Peru, have reached a 
very high state of civilization: which fact is the 
first obstacle to radical improvement and modern 
progress. The Argentine Republic, except in a 
few provinces, of which I shall speak presently, 
found a clear field or swept back to the desert those 
tribes who crossed the plains. Except in the first 
generations, by union, transient or durable, with 
a few converted Indian women, the Argentine peo- 
ple have mixed but little with the natives, who 
became immediately the enemy and fled to the 
pampa and the forests. The gaucho himself, tall 
and elegant, of Arabic type and often fine-looking, 
has in his veins but little Indian blood, diminished 



1 1 




each generation by added European elements. 
The first cross-breeding with an immigrant girl 
completes tlie purifying. Auburn and blonde hair 
is now common in the ancient pampa. In aspect and 
tendencies, the rural Argentine assimilates himself 
to the son of the Italian or Spaniard; and in some 
years, the gaucho of the plains will be no more 
than a legend and a memory. 

Studies and sketches of the gaucho were not 
wanting, as long as he was to be seen, so to speak, 
at the doors of the city. Illustrated newspapers, 
and even some popular dramas, spread everywhere 
his picturesque silhouette and his free, easy cos- 
tume, half Incasic, half Bedouin. The soft hat 
crushed on the long, black hair ; the silk tie around 
the neck falling over the opening of the motley 
poncho, which is a simplification of the Arabian 
burnotis ; the chiripd floating like the full trousers 
^of a zouave, fastened at the waist by a wide 
leathern tirador, scaly with silver piastres, and 
passing through it, the long knife, good for any pur- 
pose ; finally the broad embroidered drawers, falling 
on the spurred boots of colts leather. This pam- 
pean gaucho, very Oriental in aspect and manners, 
explains the tendency, the persistency of some 
modern writers to look to the Arabian vocabulary, 
for the etymology of the odd name, which is neither 
Spanish nor derived from the French in spite of its 
radical and consonance. But this obsolete process is 
inadmissible. This century did not establish com- 
parative philology to return to the old etymological 
blunders, anterior to Grimm's law. 



12 

When there is only one solitary word of a foreign 
derivation and of unknown origin which appears in 
a language, there is no possibility of applying the 
philological laws ; but then, the historical method 
alone must be our guide. The case never happens, 
and could not happen, of an Arabian word mak- 
ing its appearance in America without having 
been first seasoned on the Spanish soil. Now, the 
word "gaucho" has never been written nor known in 
Spain, but as imported from America. We would 
have to look nowhere but here, if it were worth the 
labor. As to myself, I believe that the innocent ^ 
lapsus of Walter Scott contains the solution, and n 
that the author of Ivanhoe, like the rooster of the 
fable, found a pearl in looking for a grain. Guacha 
is a Quichua word (the ancient Peruvian tongue} 1 
which is still in use in our dialects ; it means 
orphajt, abandoned, wandering, with a scornful 
sense. It is applied especially to animals bred 
away from their mother. The syllabic alteration 
called, I think, by grammarians metathesis, is very 
frequent in Spanish. Hence, "guacho" transformed 
into " gaucho" by the most logical process, which 
in diphthongs is the accentuated precedence of the 
strongest vowel. I beg your pardon for these 
trifles which smack of the school. 

At all events the epithet suits him. He is really 
a "wandering" and a "lost child" of the so- 
cial group, this legendary and nomad gaucho 
whose adventures begin at his birth and only end 
at his death. Born somewhere in a ranch of the 



i 



ft 



*3 



Argentine plain, early taken away from the trunk, 
growing on horseback, learning from childhood to 
fight and suffer: his first and indelible impressions 
are a general feeling of abandonment and of self- 
reliance. He grows facing impassible nature, with 
this notion always^ "present, although never 
expressed, that he must count only on himself, 
The immense* Pampa without trees or outlined 
ways, for him more barren than the sea of old 
Homer, unfolds itself to his eyes, mysterious, awful, 
indefinite. It is there that he must live, grieve, 
fight, love and die. He is surrounded by the 
desert like a lonely fisherman by the ocean. To 
overcome distance, to get his food, he has his horse 
and his lazo. To find his way on this invariably 
circular horizon, better than by the moving sun 
and the inconstant stars, he has the shades of the 
herbs, certain bushes or pajonales, which he saw 
once and never will forget ; at night, fifty leagues 
away from his refuge, after ten years of absence, 
he will find his way by the peculiar smell or taste 
of the pasture he is crossing ; so did the tyrant 
Rosas. A lost mark in that vastness, which is 
the universe for him, he has sharpened his senses 
like necessary weapons ; he has trained his hearing 
and smelling like that of a deer, and his sight as 
keen as that of a hawk; he possesses withal 
the wolfs insensibility and its resistance to hunger; 
and a power for enduring pain and wounds which 
belongs to the lower organisms. In a like-tempest 
tumult, he perceives if the herd runs away before 



14 
the storm or before an attack of Indians. In an 
invisible galloping, he counts the horses, and 
knows whether they are mounted, and whether their 
riders are soldiers, Indians or comrades. A birds 
cry, the running of an ostrich, the erected ears of his 
horse are valuable signs. In the soft sand or the 
trampled grass, his fixed Mohican eye follows the 
track of an animal: he distinguishes the footprint of a 
lost horse among tracks of a numerous troop ; he 
recognizes amongst a hundred, half a league away, 
the running colt that he marked with fire the pre- 
ceding year. He knows each animal of a herd as 
we do persons; and of the horse he chooses for 
himself, he knows the good and bad, his qualities 
and " moral" defects, just as we know the mental 
characteristics, the psychology of a friend. 

His life is adventurous and hard ; not at all sad; 
— thanks to his innate and stoical fatalism. From 
his youth, he has hardened his muscles and disci- 
plined his stomach. He grew near his rancho, 
amongst the feet of the horses and the horns of 
bulls, quick and strong, on horseback like a centaur, 
practicing in his first plays with the bolas, the lazp 
and knife-fighting, which will very soon be his 
means of living or of self-defense. Later on he 
works on a farm, changes very often to wander right 
and left, going to the hierras and county fairs, 
always led by the incurable desire of adventure and 
a longing for the desert. Careless and prodigal, 
the money he has slips through his fingers ; he 
hurries to the next prilperia, which is a rancho larger 



i5 
than the others, both the venta and the bazaar of 
the Pampa, recognized from afar by the flag which 
floats upon the thatched roof, and especially by the 
row of horses hitched to the poles. There they 
drink "cana " and gin, play at cards and taba, dance 
t\\z gato or the cielito to the gushing sounds of the 
guitar. The rustic trouvere or pay ador improvises 
his slow melopoeia in the easy metre of the old, 
- Spanish Romancer o. They gather around him, 
men and women seated on their heels, smoking 
cigarettes, listening to the rhymed songs, the 
relaciones, in a minor mode, heroic or sentimental, 
almost ever sad, where they tell of remote wars, 
expeditions on the desert, distresses and treacher- 
ous loves: and the young chinas with black tresses 
raise their large, dark eyes, covered with heavy 
eye-lids, to the chosen one. For, there is no 
bare desert without a spring and blossoms ; and, 
at the age of twenty, it is the same passion, the 
same impulse of young blood which makes the 
heart beat; the same dream which fills the brain of 
the patrician or of the peasant. And sometimes, 
also, love and jealousy helping, two rival payado- 
res have a tournament of poetry: the guitar cross- 
wise upon their knees, they by turns improvise 
amidst a deep silence. The contest begins well 
and generally ends badly. Ironical allusions, sar- 
casm and defiance creep under the cantilena. He 
who is worsted at this game of rhymes, seeks 
revenge at a less innocent one. — Through dialectic 
forms and under images borrowed from rustic life, 



i6 

which it would be impossible for me to translate 
here, the eternal bragging of personal bravery 
finds its way, just as with the heroes of Homer: 

Alguien que la echa de guapo, 
Y en lo fiero queda atras, 
Es poncho de poco trapo, 
Purito flecono mas. 

And the adversary replies in the same style : 

Naides con la vaina sola 
Al buen gaucho ha de correr ; 
Lazito de tanta armada 
Nunca ha voltiao la res. * 

In this strain, the poetical joust can not be pro- 
longed ; knives break forth from the sheathes, and 
one of the troubadours falls on the spot. Amidst 
the screams of the women and the stillness of the 
men who pick up the wounded one, his adversary 
unties his horse without being molested, throws him- 
self into the saddle, and rides away slowly.. .Now, 
he must go far into the familiar pampa to avoid 
the gendarmerie, the partida, who, moreover, 
will not pursue him for a long time. He will 
wander from rancho to rancho, telling his desgracia 
(misfortune) with more pride than contrition, 
finding everywhere protection and a hearty wel- 
come, for he did not strike traitorously, against a 
disarmed enemy. And the gaucho becomes an 

**(i) The disadvantage of these textual citations is that they become very insipid 
when translated, and then the translation still needs an explanation. Leaving out 
the incorrectness of the gaucho style, the sense of the cited verses is about as follows : 
" He who plays the braggard, and at the time of danger remains behind — he is a 
poncho of very poor stuff — all fringe and nothing more. " Nobody can put me to 
flight— in showing me but the sheath of his knife; — the lazo which has so large a 
swing— never upsets the animal." 



17 
outlaw or bandit, finally immigrating for some time 
to the Indians or to the neighboring provinces. It 
occurs he is caught and sent to the frontier in the 
regiment of discipline. That does not alter his life 
much, and he is a good cavalry soldier, especially 
if the war breaks out. It was with those soldiers 
that the War of Independence was made, that 
eeneral San Martin crossed the Andes and threw 
to the sea the Spanish soldiers who had resisted 
Napoleon ; it was with these hardy, enduring 
eauchos trained for the war, that the liberals 
pursued Rosas, and that the Argentine Republic 
turned out from his den in Paraguay the gross and 
vulgar dictator who crushed this people, histor- 
ically predestined to be the prey of all tyrannies. 

Such, in short, is the picturesque, and in spite of 
everything, the interesting and sympathetic physi- 
ognomy of this son of the Pampas. Notwithstand- 
ing his vices and his " peccadilloes," you always 
like him in the end, because he is open, loyal, 
hospitable, very gentle and very naif under his rough 
appearance ; one does not shun him, and in long 
travelling, around the nightly fire in the desert, one 
likes to have him talk, and willingly tarries awhile 
with him. Such, you see, is the case with me; and 
consequently, I have but a few minutes for 
describing to you the other variety which was to 
be the principal object of my lecture. 

The Argentine Nation is, as you all know, a 
federal republic of fourteen autonomous states, and 



i8 

nine large territories governed directly by the cen- 
tral power. Theoretically, the political organiza- 
tion is like that of the United States. Everywhere, 
the ordinary language, official as well as popular, 
is the Spanish tongue. One state only is an excep- 
tion ; it is the province of Santiago, which has 
been taken from the ancient Tucuman. Natur- 
ally, Spanish is now spoken in the cities, but the 
whole country speaks the quichua, the language of 
the Incas from Peru. Formerly, it was the usual 
tongue even in the superior class, who, however, 
understand and speak it still. Around Santiago, 
in the remnant of the colonial Tucuman, up to the 
territory bordering on High Peru, there is no vest- 
ige of that foreign tongue ; it has never been 
spoken there. I have published a study elsewhere, 
in an official work printed in Spanish, of that lin- 
guistic phenomenon, and I here sum up the result. 
A long time ago, this territory of forest and 
bushes, situated between the rivers Salado and 
Dulce, was inhabited by a large Indian tribe, called 
Juri by some, and Lule by others, which I explained 
to be the same word pronounced in the Indian and 
in the Spanish way. It was an industrious and 
gentle people, qualities still to be found among its 
present representatives. At the end of the four-r 
teenth century, when the power of the Incas was at 
its height and Cuzco was the capital of an immense 
empire, there occurred a very peculiar historical 
adventure. It is reported in the classic Comenta- 
vios Reales of Garcilaso, of which you have only 
an incomplete copy in your Public Library. 



19 

Those brave Lules of Tucuman woke up at the 
noise of the Peruvian glory and, without taking 
advice from their neighbors north or south, they 
sent an embassy — on foot, naturally-— to the Inca 
Huiracocha, who reigned at that time. It was four 
hundred leagues of bare desert and snowy mount- 
ains, where in some places everything is wanting, 
even air fit to breathe. I crossed them on horse- 
back, and I can assure you that even to-day it is 
a hard journey. For those poor ambassadors, 
accustomed to the tropical mildness of their native 
soil, it must have been terrible. 

Admitted before the Inca, in the midst of his 
court dazzling with gold and precious stuffs, the 
messengers laid down at the foot of the throne 
their humble presents of the far-away land. In 
exchange for their sacrificed liberty, they asked for 
civilization : and, to me, this spontaneous homage, 
this instinctive impulse of an obscure tribe towards 
the light, is one of the most touching things of 
South American history. They were listened to 
and served according to their wishes. Without 
trying to conquer the immense intermediate terri- 
tory, the Inca sent to the Tucuman, which name 
had just been revealed to him, a prince of his fam- 
ily, with a numerous escort of officers, of curacas, 
intrusted to initiate the tribe into the good and the 
bad of civilization. 

They assimilated rapidly the knowledge and in- 
dustries of their pacific masters, especially the lan- 
guage; and so thoroughly, that the old disappeared 



20 

entirely and that the Spanish tongue,after three cen- 
turies of political domination, has not been able to 
eradicate the "cuzco", as they call it, the sweet 
singing idiom they had learned with love. This is 
why, in the most European republic of South Amer- 
ica, there is a whole province that speaks the 
language of the Peruvians, used before the first 
trip of Columbus. Yet, — and it is a general law 
confirmed in philology — a people who believes 
it has adopted the whole of a foreign tongue^ 
has only taken the vocabulary of it. The grafting 
•does not reach the grammatical essence, which 
remains as before. The " Santiaguenos ," as 
they are called now, grafted the Quichua diction- 
ary onto the Lule grammar; and it is the only dif- 
ference between their dialect and the language of 
the Incas. By the way, the deepest varieties of 
the neo-Latine languages have no other origin. 
The invasions or superpositions of races attack the 
lexicon of the natives, which is a social fact; almost 
never the private structure and the marrow of the 
speech, which is the thought itself, that is to say, 
an anthropological and cerebral element. 

Nothing isolates more than difference of lan- 
guage ; of this fact I myself am making a sad proof 
to-day, I, who do not speak your tongue fluently. 
The Argentine Ouichuas, the orauchos from Santi- 
ago, " embalm " themselves, so to speak, in their 
traditions, manners and superstitions. Indepen- 
dence came after the Colonial era of the missions 
and servitude; the constitutional life after anarchy : 



2 1 

nothing could attack that erratic block; and, thanks 
to the old preserved tongue, it is there, better than 
anywhere else, that the thick growth of beliefs and 
legends among the primitive tribes can be studied. 
Their preferred dwelling place is always that 
large zone of forests, between the two rivers 
already spoken of. There, the rustic life is very 
easy. The warm and dry climate allows living 
out of doors for most of the year. Besides large 
herds of cattle of the estancia, the sheep and the 
goats prosper wonderfully. Each family estab- 
lished near a farm has its rancho made of posts and 
earth, and its flocks. The master allows each one 
of his herdsmen to enclose a piece of ground for 
his personal use. It is there that each gaucho 
sells his grain, vegetables and watermelons, which 
are delicious. Those living on the banks of the 
river find plentiful and palatable fish ; they catch 
generally with a reed lance, especially on the Salado. 
To all, the big woods offer different resources and 
supplies. First, the carob-trees, the algarrobos 
(Prosopis) which everywhere cover the ground. 
Their savory and saccharine pod gives a food 
much sought for ; when fermented it produces a 
liquor, for me much more preferable to the pulque 
of the Mexicans. The fruit ripens in the begin- 
ning of the summer. When the large cicadse 
called coyuyos, hidden in the foliage, fill the forest 
with their metallic grating, " Ya canta el coyuyo!" 
is the general cry. The ranchos are deserted ; men 
and women go to the shady solitude, full of perfumes 



22 



and murmur. They live merrily upon what they 
pick up in their ponchos, tied by the four corners, 
as well as on the game : hares, rabbits, tatous are 
quite plentiful ; they have also wild honey, which 
they find in the ground or in the heart of the big 
quebrachos ; the chanar and mistol fruits and the 
Indian figs of the cactus. When night falls, they 
meet in groups and mix in a glade ; through the 
balmy air comes the perfume of the verveins, the 
wild lily, and, prevailing over all, the honeyed and 
strong fragrance of the sombra-de-toro. They sing 
softly, to the sound of the guitar, very old, gloomy 
tunes, elegiac yaravis, some of them brought from 
Cuzco four centuries ago. And whilst the young 
people stroll in the darkness, old and children form 
a ring and together embroider, about an incident 
of the present or precedent day, some mysterious 
story which will bloom like a magic plant. They 
keep enough of those stories with a real kernel to fill 
a Flos Sanctorum. I collect several each year, dur- 
ing the time I pass there on a family estate. I may 
say that I have spent there, in the peace of soul 
and joy of country life, amongst this population 
who saw all my family born and grown up, the 
sweetest and most restful hours of my life. 

If I had time, I would tell you some of their 
legends, some of their superstitions and symbolic 
beliefs. They have some on all the beings of the 
woods, on all incidents of their free life, on all the 
period from their birth to their death. Their reli- 
gious creeds have bloomed with smiling or sad sym- 



2 3 
bols, as in resemblance to their far-off evangelization 
by that gentle apostle San Francisco Solano, another 
Francis of Assis, as candid and more rustic than the 
founder. They have, in a remote village, a miracu- 
lous picture brought down especially from heaven, 
and made of quebracho-wood ; they bring to it wild 
honey, watermelons, sucking kids, and the vicar 
sputters out a response to their dead, or distributes 
to them in exchange a blessed ribbon, as a receipt. 
As all primitive people, they cover with flowers and 
songs their dead children ; but, moreover, they take 
as a benefit the general deliverance from life ; and 
even over the body of relatives, with the harrowing 
complaints of the weepers, during the funeral eve are 
heard the festive sounds of musical instruments,. 
And this careless contempt for the being, in those 
ignorant people, meets the pessimistic conception^ 
which seems to be at present the last word of 
our philosophy. 

On all animals of the forest they build beliefs ; 
some terrible ones on the tiger and puma; some 
facetious on the atoj> the fox, called by them -' Don 
Juan," by raillery; some melancholy, on others. 
For instance, there is a moving story about a certain 
owl who cries out during the whole night in the 
foliage, calling to his brother. This one is very 
affecting, and reminds one of the Metamorphosis of 
Ovidius. It was a girl who has been turned into a 
night-bird for having refused some honey to her 
brother, who was returning from the monte starv- 
ing ; since that time she throws into the darkness 
her piteous Indian cry; turay, my brother! 



24 

To the hunter, the meeting of certain animals is 
a bad omen ; and very often, the peon who used to 
accompany me, advised me to return home. With 
the fox there is still some hope, if he crossed the 
path from left to right ; but if it is the boa, who has 
left on the ground his long and smooth mark, it is 
useless to go farther ahead, and the rustic fixes on 
his saddle his superfluous boleadoras. 

They have witches, who are also physicians and 
know the herbs ; especially the woman-witches, 
who are in turn beneficient or fatal. They cure a 
knife-blow or set a bone, for the same price that 
they procure love or cast a spell on an enemy. 
This habit of magical charm, as you know, has 
crossed the ages ; and it is very interesting to find 
in a cabin of Santiago the waxen image transfixed 
with the bloody pins, used by the Roman Canidia 
and Catherine de Medici. Naturally, man and 
woman-witches go to their nocturnal meetings, 
which they call "Salamanca". — It is still a signi- 
ficant point, this creed everywhere spread, which 
united science and witchery,, as with us in the 
Middle Ages. The old Spaniards formerly called 
a bonesetter an " algebrist." For them a scholar was 
first a man who spoke latin: and you will find the 
" laciino r \ as a guide and artful interpreter as far 
as the tribes of Chaco. Our " salamanca " is, with- 
out doubt, a superstitious echo of the old Spanish 
University. The meeting or sabbatic vigil is held 
in the depth of the wood, in a cave r whose en- 
trance is a narrow opening, which you would take 



2 5 
for the den of the inoffensive vizcachas. You would 
be wrong to enter it on your knees ; it is there that 
the " Bad", at midnight, presides over the black 
mass, surrounded by fantastic animals who are 
witches, in a display of macabre luxury which makes 
one shiver, by dint of being alluring. 

Religion is the root of superstition ; the popular 
poetry is its flower. All those gauchos of Santi- 
ago have the poetical sentiment, although the 
expression is poor and defaced. They are especi- 
ally musicians, crazy for melody, with a surprising 
musical memory and hearing ear. If the Argen- 
tine Republic reaches to have some inspired artists, 
I believe that they will come out from Santiago, 
that they have already come, as did Alcorta, whose 
grandson is the young Williams. — I have no time 
to recite numerous specimens of this singing 
poetry ; besides, the best yaravis are in the Quichua 
language, hard to translate. I have put some short 
pieces into Spanish verses, for those who can 
understand this language, keeping the meter, which 
is essential. It is never the martial note which 
dominates, as with the gaucho of the pampa, but 
sadness, regrets and love — what the Bolivians, 
fond of niandolznale, would call "sentiment," which 
is truly a world of romance. Thus, this stanza 
from a deceived or discarded lover : 

" Su labio no se pinto 
Con clavel, coral ni grana, 
Sino con sangre que mana 
Del corazon que partio! * i 

*(l) It is not the color of the coral, of the pink, or of the cochineal which reddens 
thy lips; but that of the blood whispering from the heart thou hast wounded. 



26 

Or, still this fine beginning of a madrigal, which 
is a whole litany of love and ends on this sigh of 
despair : But all that, why didst thou tell it to me? 
Ima pachta niaranki ? 

Como es, paloma mia, 

Paloma blanca, 
Que, para un pecho solo, 
Tienes dos alas ? — 

— Es que el amor cobijo 
Que me entregaras; 
Y dos alas preciso 
Para dos almas, i 

This is the usual note and rhyme; but sometimes 
it rises ; a fine picture, a deep philosophical reflec- 
tion bursts out from the depths of human heart, 
the same everywhere. I have heard on those 
rustic lips a reminiscent sound from a famous ten 
line stanza of the great Calderon, the Shakespeare 
of Spain : Cttentan de ten sabio que un dia. 
At last, the well known feriuntque summos ful- 
gura monies, of Horatius, presented itself to the 
minstrel of the desert with this agrestic and local 
form : (Take courage, it is my last quotation.) 

Por ser mas chico, el pobre 

Es mas seguro: 
Hiere el rayo al quebracho 

Y nunca al suncho.2 

(i) Oh my dove, my white dove— how is it that thou hast two wings for only one 
heart ? 'Tis because my bosom shelters the love which thou gavest me, and I need two 
wings for the two souls I have." 

(2) The poor lives in security because he is small ; the lightening strikes the high 
quebracho, never the humble bush. 



Ladies and Gentlemen : — I close this too long 
lecture, where, however, I have only outlined the 
subject and set the landmark to be followed in a 
more serious study. As incomplete and hasty as 
my lecture has been, I see you have felt the 
value and real interest of the material, through 
the faults and weakness of my exposition. This 
lecture, I believe, is the longest you have heard in 
this Congress, and I fear I have exhausted your 
kindness. To excuse this monopolizing of your 
valuable time, this real indiscretion, I did not count 
on the seduction of form, and lesson the attraction 
of my foreign accent. I have too much forgotten 
this sentence of Emerson, your most profound 
mind, which he expressed in his habitual lapidary 
style : The man is only half himself , the other half 
is his expression. 

For that, allow me to tell you sincerely that I 
am more grateful for your meritorious attention 
than for your indulgent cheers. And since you 
have excused for this time my bad elocution, 
I promise you that I shall speak better at your next 
World's Columbian Fair! 



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